What is wisdom and how do you get it?

What is wisdom and how do you get it?

Belief is a magical kingdom and fairy tales, dreams, myths, and fables with their symbolical language are part of that kingdom. The key to understanding them is not by being literal-minded, but by surrendering oneself to the spell of these stories and interpreting them figuratively and metaphorically to reveal themselves in their magical way. If you have an interest in the language of myth, dreams, and fairy tales, you might want to read the works of Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim, especially his book, The Uses of Enchantment.

Ancient Wisdom Literature

There are some who can process wisdom only by reading these kinds of stories. This was certainly the way among ancient peoples, although most of them simply listened, since they couldn’t read for various reasons. Those who wrote or collected these stories like Aesop, Phaedrus, Babrius, and Avianus were psychologists whose tales were perennial sources of inspiration, strength, and healing to those who heard them recited from memory by those who carried the wisdom of their culture from village to village by way of these stories.

If you are a seeker of wisdom keep yourself open to inspiration no matter where you may find it since it can be found wherever you look, especially in these literary genres. What source is the best? It depends on the person, for whatever speaks to you and helps you to grow as a person is a portal to a special place you can visit again and again and never touch bottom.

And while you’re reading these stories, you cannot do anything or be anywhere else more important because your life might have been preparing you for these very moments — even the dry spells in your life make you more receptive to understanding what you need to understand at these moments in your life. So, whether it be times of depression, hours of disillusion, or periods of indifference or meaninglessness, never waste these experiences because they may be preparing you for such encounters by the inner hunger they produce in you.

Social Protest Literature

Finally, there are stories about human freedom, dignity, and social justice in a world that cannot afford to admit the need for these things because society has been arranged to weaken our belief in these ideals to lessen our resistance to oppressive conditions. You might call these kinds of stories a countercultural presence that gives those who read them strength and hope never to surrender to the “official” view of anything whose purpose it is to distract a population from such moments of introspection and healing.

As you grow older, you begin to see things you never noticed when young — that too many people aren’t given their rights because those in power don’t want them to have them. Denying what is owed them in justice naturally makes people’s lives much harder than they need be. If you read the ancient texts of every civilization, especially their religious Scriptures and prophets, they all talk about how wrong it is to deny people their rights. The Old Testament Psalms and Prophets have always been a source of immense comfort and healing for people during times of personal or national calamities down through the ages.

But one need not stop there. There is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Hinduism’s Upanishads, Buddhism’s Dhammapada, Zoroastrianism’s Avesta; The Analects of Confucius, The Tao Teh King of Taoism, The Koran of Islam, and the Gospels of the New Testament — wherever you find your inspiration.

If you come from a background where you haven’t experienced these problems of oppression and the denial of social justice, consider yourself fortunate because most people experience nothing in their lives but continual heartache. Wherever you look in history, you see the same struggle unless mention of it has been suppressed, which always happens for political reasons lest it prove an embarrassment to those in power.

But try to look beneath the surface of things even today and you will see that these same age-old problems are still very much with us. Wherever and whenever people aren’t treated fairly or are scapegoated because they are different or poor, you know that these people are being wronged and have done nothing to deserve this inhuman treatment.

Instead of confronting the real causes of the problems that exist in every society like greed, lust for power, and social injustice caused by the wealthy and corrupt government and business officials, these persecuted individuals are themselves unjustifiably blamed to distract attention from the actual causes that always have to do with the policies of those in power.

In the past, you would never find these kinds of stories in history books or in official sources of information because the country’s leaders didn’t want word to get out lest it create civil unrest among the oppressed who would discover just how many they were in other parts of the country. Government and Big Business never wanted to reveal to the public how terrible labor conditions were and the many labor strikes that were occurring in other parts of the country to prevent national uprisings or revolution. The news was also censored to favor the rich and powerful.

The oppressed always took courage and resisted when they understood that there were hundreds of thousands just like them in different parts of the nation also suffering from social injustice. Those unfair conditions had always been there, but many became so used to them that they thought that this was the way life was “supposed to be.” At least that’s what they were taught, so that gradually they came to accept those conditions as inevitable and never protested.

The problem, however, was that those conditions weren’t inevitable at all, but simply the result of political decisions made behind the scenes by the rich and powerful, who always have the strength and patience to bear the sufferings of the poor! If you want a good introduction into the modern American struggle that goes on even today behind the scenes, read the works and columns of Ralph Nader. Many think he’s a saint, while a few believe he’s the devil incarnate.

Indifference toward the suffering of others has always been one of the strongest weapons the powerful have in weakening the natural instinct of human solidarity against all forms of oppression.

They try to divide the poor, the working poor, and what’s left of the middle class against themselves by turning different religious, ethnic, and racial groups against one other to distract them from their common enemy, their powerful oppressors, who are working “to divide and conquer.” However, today’s Black Lives Matter movement is catching fire all across the nation as pubic recognition is now increasingly being paid to the classics of Black writers who try to educate the White population about what our nation’s Black population has always had to endure as witnessed by these ten bestsellers: The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin; Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; The Ways of White Folks, Langston Hughes; Native Son, Richard Wright; Race Matters, Cornel West; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; and Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon;

It’s what the entire Privatization Movement today is about in America — getting rid of the notion that we’re all in this together, so that it’s harder to organize against social injustice.

It’s why the political Right has always been intent on weakening and abolishing labor and teacher unions and any organization that pursues the Common Good? In unity there is strength to resist this systematic attempt to disenfranchise the American worker, and why those in power want to abolish public schools and replace them with charter schools that forbid unions.

Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.